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Dreamcatcher

“Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.” Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher is a science fiction come horror novel published by King in 2001 and written while the author was recovering from the injuries that he sustained in an automobile accident in 1999. Stephen King was nearly killed in the accident when he was struck by a pickup truck while out walking on a road near to his home in Maine.Dreamcatcher was the first novel that Stephen King wrote following the accident and it was originally written in longhand because his injuries prevented him from sitting up at a keyboard. King says the he wrote the book while in an immense amount of pain from his injuries, sat in a chair and propped up by pillows. The book was adapted into a film in 2003 directed by Lawrence Kasdan and starring Damian Lewis, Thomas Jane, Timothy Olyphant and Jason Lee.

‘Dreamcatcher’ is set near the fictional town of Derry, the home of Pennywise the clown from the Stephen King novel It and revolves around four friends; Beav, Henry, Pete, and Jonesy who are on their annual hunting trip in the woods. The four friends, who had twenty five years earlier, rescued a Down syndrome boy from bullies, now each have their own mid-life issues to deal with from Beav, with his love problems, through to Henry, who is considering suicide. Not forgetting to mention Jonsey, who has been having weird premonitions ever since he was hit by car, no prizes for guessing why King got into that theme at this particular point in his life.As is usually the case with a Stephen King novel, things start off relatively normal until an old man named McCarthy turns up at the friend's cabin in the woods, suffering from what at first appears to be the worst case of flatulence ever experienced. The descriptions of McCarthy’s stomach problems are quite humorous to begin with until we discover that the cause of it is not from eating berries in the woods, as he first claimed, but the presence of a rather unpleasant eel like alien parasite that has made a home for itself in McCarthy’s gut.To cut a long story short, and it really is a long one, what the friends have discovered is an alien invasion. The story is as much a psychological thriller as it is science fiction or horror and it includes people becoming zombies, telepathic abilities and aliens exploding from peoples bottoms! What is interesting is how Stephen King gives the alien parasites point of view as well, as it experiences driving a car, what it’s like to have a sugar rush and emotions, all for the first time, from inside a human body.

The book is a horror story, but if you have a childish sense of humour, then it is a bit difficult to take the toilet scenes seriously. Stephen King says that he wanted to write about something terrible that can happen in the bathroom. We do get a lot of bad news in the bathroom like discovering a lump or finding blood in our stools and, depending on how toilet based your sense of humour is, It kind of works.But the toilet scenes aside, which are only a very small part of the book, Stephen Kings Dreamcatcher is another great example of the author’s ability to portray ordinary people making a stand against the extraordinary.

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